Hybrid Workscapes: Emergent Infrastructures of Automation and Co-production in Horticultural Production

By Grace Abou Jaoude and Víctor Muñoz Sanz

Horticultural production clusters are increasingly shifting to a
collection of hybrid spaces and infrastructures harnessing different models of
sharing: between robots and human operators, and between horticultural
production firms and industrial sectors. Amidst rising market demands,
competition, and a growing need for product differentiation, human-machine
collaboration, flexibility and optimization are essential to sustain a
consistent supply of products and enhance greenhouse performance.

Technological advances and hybrid solutions in the Westland, the main
horticultural cluster in the Netherlands, have enabled the establishment of
large-scale greenhouses transforming productive structures into actual
infrastructures that embrace radical forms of postfordism sustained by
automation, shared networks, and migrant workers. On the one hand, industrial platforms,
automated machines and robotic manipulators have been integrated in the
horticultural production process, substituting for labor or assisting human
operators by performing repetitive simple tasks — despite advances in
Artificial Intelligence and robotic systems, humans are still required in the
event of abrupt incidents or for careful handling of products, and temporary
labor is also shared through hiring agencies to support the horticultural
production process. On the other, on a larger scale, the agglomeration of
greenhouses and economic activity enables sharing resources through common
infrastructural networks. Possibilities for sharing resources are not only tied
to the aggregation of greenhouses in the cluster but also to proximal centers
of consumption and to industries at the Port of Rotterdam.

The
infrastructuralization of hybrid agro-industrial workscapes incorporating automated technologies and human
operators, and complex industrial ecologies have been underrepresented in the
architectural and planning discourses. By looking at the Westland, this article
will speculate on to what extent this region offers a contemporary model for
sharing work, space, and resources between humans and machines, and explore how
the cluster’s spatial configuration mirrors those organizational and
technological shifts in the production process.

Outline

First, the article will briefly introduce the Westland and discuss about
the area and its history – how the horticultural productive cluster came into
being and how larger forces, economic and technological, shaped the territory.

Second, it will introduce a series of case studies of greenhouses, each
specializing in the production of a variety of plant species and processes. By
doing this, it will document hybrid workspaces and automated technologies
deployed – how is work sequentially shared between technologies and operators.

Third, it will discuss how sharing of energy and resources currently
occurs at a larger scale between industries at the Port of Rotterdam and the
horticultural cluster in Westland.

Fourth, the text will elaborate on how these technological advances and
modes of sharing have resulted in new spatial organizations across scales, and
transformed greenhouses into postfordist infrastructures conditioned by
capital, competitiveness, and globalization, and discuss the implications.

Finally, the article will conclude by speculating on future, sustainable models
of sharing work, space, and resources between the horticultural production
cluster and surrounding urban centers.